User talk:mxn/2013

Messages sent to Minh Nguyễn in 2013

No one’s paying attention to the discussions on this archive page anymore. Please start a new discussion at my main talk page.

infl-->head

Just so you know, the {{infl}} template has been renamed to {{head}}. More importantly, however, you should use a language specific template when one exists, like {{vi-noun}} or {{vi-adj}}. Thanks! —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:08, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

tea

For the two definitions of tea, the leaves of the plant versus the drink they're used to make, should there be a distinction between trà and chè? (and also for the record 茶 is also listed but I can't read that) TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 08:36, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. You should do more nominations of Vietnamese foods and food types on FWOTD, I know they're very fond of that. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 08:51, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Are phải and trái considered to be adjectives or adverbs? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 01:49, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Will we also have a template like {{ja-l}} that maybe you could design? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 07:21, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Is the stuff released by FVDP under a free license, or at least compatible with CC-By-SA? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 19:37, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

See User talk:TeleComNasSprVen.

Thanks for the clarification. For mươi did you also consider the definition at the -ty suffix? Just an idea, but it's your call what definition to give it (as noun, as suffix, etc) TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 05:41, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Re: Vietnamese character entries

I think changes to the way wiktionary deals with the old Vietnamese Hán tự and chữ Nôm characters would be welcome, particularly with the latter chữ Nôm characters that were only used in Vietnam. There isn't a whole lot of information about chữ Nôm characters compared to the Sino-Vietnamese characters, but the Nom Foundation does have some books that might be of interest to you, especially since you have decent understanding of modern Vietnamese language. Otherwise, I don't know if I can really add anything that isn't already covered by the discussion you started at the Beer Parlor discussion room. Bumm13 (talk) 17:53, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Just for the record, I'm not fluent in any East Asian language (I wish I was!) but I'm pretty good at researching information that needs to be sourced, dealing with CJKV data/organization in general, etc. Bumm13 (talk) 17:55, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm afraid that reading modern Vietnamese does not translate well into reading chữ Nôm or any Chinese-like characters, especially since they were out of use since the 1920s. The best analogy I could draw about these would be like English speakers learning Latin, the vast majority of which is probably found in a museum or legal discourse. There are some concepts in quốc ngữ that are outside English, but for the vast majority of modern Vietnamese terms there are often major overlaps. Nom Foundation is probably where we would get the most info about these characters anyway.

I've also been thinking about adding a newer Wiktionary:About Vietnamese page but I think I'll hold off to see what others think of the BP discussion first, and due to the fact that it's also going to add a lot more work and instruction to the bloated ELE page. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 18:35, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

A better analogy might be Anglo-Saxon written in Runes, although I would assume that Nôm of the 20th century would pretty closely match modern Vietnamese. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 22:01, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I've been looking over the entry at Việt Nam lately and for a moment the definition looked off to me, but I think I've realized a feature of Vietnamese I've never really noticed. It seems that Vietnamese grammar allows nouns to take other nouns as adjective modifiers, partially because there are no adjectival inflections, or generally any sort of inflections in Vietnamese at all. There are only a few pure adjectives, mostly the colors, ordinal numbers, and such. It implies lots of noun-phrases/adjectives and lots of maintenance. How best do we deal with this? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 20:43, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Vietnamese is for the most part quite flexible with parts of speech. Vietnamese-Vietnamese dictionaries deal with this flexibility by only calling out the "true" parts of speech. So "Việt Nam" would only call out the noun sense. Meanwhile, an English-Vietnamese dictionary will translate "Vietnam" as "Việt Nam" and "Vietnamese" as "(thuộc) Việt Nam", "tiếng Việt", and "người Việt". One would have to consult the appendix on grammar (Wiktionary:About Vietnamese?) to discover that any noun can be turned into an adjective using prepositions like thuộc or của, and the reverse can be done with sự or tính.

This is a problem for the Vietnamese Wiktionary, because only Vietnamese entries have translation sections, but Vietnamese has no word that translates to "Vietnamese" – an entry called "thuộc Việt Nam" would fail the "idiomaticity" test. The answer there may be beefed-up inflection lines. For example, the headword line for "harmonious" would look like:

harmonious (so sánh more harmonious, cao cấp most harmonious, danh từ harmony, động từ harmonize)

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:53, 31 December 2013 (UTC)